


The Secret Ingredient is Always Love

by lynndyre



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-23 04:06:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11395020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: Percival's looking to find his feet again, and finds a bakery on the way.





	The Secret Ingredient is Always Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [days4daisy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/days4daisy/gifts).



Percival Graves is wearing out the soles of his shoes trying to know his city again. New York doesn't sleep, doesn't stand still- it never has, and it sure didn't while he was gone. It's still grimy, still full of punks, but there's a change in it, when he can get out there and walk down the streets, ground himself in the pavement and the people. 

It starts because he's got places he needs to see, places marked by dark little swirling clouds on the map in his office. Incidents from the reports on Theseus' brother. The damage has been repaired, erased back into the normal wear and weathering of New York, but Graves needs to see it anyway. Feel it.

The convention hall shows banners for an exhibition. The city, always moving, has moved on from Shaw, and even his father's newspapers have got to find other things to print.

The subway tunnel is just a tunnel. The things that spark are the electrical lights, no-maj installed, cloth-coated wire chewed by the rats he can hear skittering nearby, heedless of humanity magical or otherwise. 

He stands a long time in front of the Second Salem church building.

An obscurus, raised and created here on American soil, in this age, shouldn't have happened. Any damn way you cut it, it shouldn't have happened. 

A lot of things shouldn't have happened. Some of them he can fix.

The park and the zoo have a different feel. The animals there are wary of him, they remember the magic, even if their keepers do not. The treestump in the park gives him pause. The story is 'freak bolt of lightning', an easy one to convince people of, it fits easily into expectations. Graves reaches down to lay his hand on the bark, just above the roots. The truth is that erumpent fluid did too much damage for the restorers to repair or heal the living tree. New Yorkers have already made off with the resulting firewood. Still, it's a nice place. He can see why the animals went for it.

The street is grey but the sun slants down the side of the buildings, warming the brick to something like alive. He looks up at the angle of it, the lengthening afternoon, and returning his eyes to street level makes everything appear darker, turns the alleyways to evening.

He walks past the boarding house where the Goldsteins live, but doesn't stop. He has questions, but they're caught in his throat, gritted behind his back teeth. Auror Goldstein still watches him with an extra focus, and why should she not? All of them will, until he can prove himself again, and she's got better reason than most.

He walks past the no-maj's new bakery, too, where the sign's just gone up, and the workmen are just leaving. The next time he passes, the window is full, and the smell pulls at him, warm and sweet, follows him down the street.

They are beautiful pastries. 

He walks until the shadows start to feel like night and then he steps into them, swirls into nowhere, to go home.

Life carries on, and it's a rainy night, the end of a rainy day that's followed a wet and freezing week, while spring pretends to creep up on them, and Graves casts discreet warming charms inside his boots. He should go home, but he damn well doesn't want to. He'd rather fight the rain than the things in his head, rather be out in the city to feel the miserable beat of its hungry heart.

The rain gets heavier, and it's dark early, the kind of dark where streetlights and headlights are haloed by the wet, and lighted windows are little squares of elsewhere, none of their light escaping to the street itself. He turns a corner into the wind and is blown back by it, bends his body into the force of the air. A car skids on the water, fishtails through a puddle with a screech of something mechanical, and Graves wards off the spray of dirty water with a gesture, letting the wave subside into the gutter. The sky rewards him with another sideways squall.

"You okay, buddy? You look like you could use a place to dry out."

He's by the no-maj's bakery. The shutters are already down on the display window, and the front is dark, the light's coming from the back rooms.

Percival pushes a hand back over his hair, and the water streams down his neck, seeping further under his collar. He must look even stranger from a no-maj perspective, bareheaded and out of doors in this kind of weather. He's never quite learnt to like wearing a hat - the brim reduces the field of vision too much.

He ought to make his apologies and go home. But Kowalski holds the door open wider, and the rain is blowing inside, and Percival moves without thinking it through.

It's _warm_ inside, the kind of warm that's more than bakery ovens or the basement furnace. There's an aura to the whole place, really, something Graves might have called a woman's touch if there were any indication of a woman living here. Something home-like, even though it's not like any home from Graves' personal experience.

And God, the place smells good. His stomach betrays him cheerfully at the thought, growling like a jarvey. Kowalski laughs out loud. 

"Hey, don't worry, buddy! I've got a pot of soup on, and there are rolls from this morning. I'm Kowalski, like on the sign," said with a vaguely upwards gesture. 

Graves manages a bizarre introduction while still dripping water on the man's floor, and follows him down the hallway, flicking away the evidence of rain behind him. He's not sure whether to be embarrassed or bemused or _what_. People don't go around inviting strange wizards into their houses, this is New York. But Percival's been in magical law enforcement – and other places – long enough not to turn down a free meal.

The soup is chicken, if more vegetable than meat, and it's rich and garlicky, with fat glistening and pooling in warm yellow drops along the surface. It coats his lips and throat when he drinks it, in the best way. The rolls are soft and yeasty, and soak up the broth in perfect compliment.

Kowalski is friendly. He talks, easily, if nervously, and when he gets going there's really something to it. He's not lacking in depth, but he doesn't seem to have any level of deception. It's odd. Percival likes it.

Graves himself doesn't say a lot. Most of his life it'd be against the law to talk about, to Kowalski. But that's an excuse, and he knows it. He doesn't say much to anybody in the wizarding world either. There are people he can imagine speaking too, people on the other side of the Atlantic, who he hasn't spoken to in years -with Scamander the younger involved, he thinks Theseus might understand the mess of it- but Europe has their own way of doing things, and maybe Theseus wouldn't want to hear it. It was his critter-loving baby brother that Percival's doppelganger nearly killed, after all. 

When Percival leaves, the storm is slowing, and Jacob is yawning happily, and Percival is left with a lingering heat inside and a schoolboy question of 'have I made a friend?'

And so Graves keeps coming back to the bakery, in the evenings. It's embarrassing, or it should be, how much he needs it, but Kowalski- even if he doesn't remember magic, he remembers war, and he knows the ways men get broken, and he likes to help. And there's something in his eyes, the twist of his moustache when he smiles. Graves thinks maybe Kowalski doesn't have so many friends he couldn't use another one. 

That doesn't mean he's forgotten his manners, though. Percival can't cook, wouldn't inflict it on Jacob even if he could, and his house is too magical to bring Kowalski there. (Yet, says the little treason voice.) But if you go eat at somebody's house, you bring a gift – and that part he can do. 

Sometimes he brings a bottle, charms the slinking wampus on the label into immobility, and pours for them both. Sometimes Percival brings a canister of imported cinnamon, a pouch of vanilla pods. Kowalski sells cinnamon-dusted puffskeins, and keeps a couple back behind the counter. Percival savors every ridiculous bite, and sits leaning on Kowalski's kitchen counter while he cooks- slowly, the no-maj way. Drifting, enjoying the quiet, watching Jacob cook and listening to stories of the other side of New York.

Sometimes, Jacob talks about his dreams. They're magic, he says, since this last winter; fantastic, full of wonder and creatures, danger and beauty and joy. Jacob likes the dreams, sees the possibilities of magic, is game for it all, the wonderment and danger alike. It's endearing. Percival has, in his life, come to feel magic like breathing, something natural and easily overlooked, and in the last year, increasingly a chore he's lost all joy in. 

Jacob's way is better. It's something to fight for. Percival wants to be there when Jacob gets to see his dreams are real.

Now, when Graves walks out the doors of the Woolworth Building and hits the pavement at the end of the day, he breathes in the stink of the city, and it's familiar. Alive. There's something alchemical in the air, a striving transmutation, the whole damn city forever trying to turn itself from lead into gold.

Red knows a guy who knows an elf who's got a line on exotic fruits. Maybe Percival will pick up a few things, see what kind of magic Jacob will make with that.


End file.
